View and listen to the Top 10 Author Event Podcasts Downloaded in March 2014.

Authors coming to the Free Library soon include opera singer Jessye Norman, photographer Vincent Feldman, actress Marlo Thomas, cartoonist Roz Chast, political satirist Christopher Buckley, and legendary filmmaker John Waters, to name just a few! View our full schedule for upcoming Spring and Summer 2014 author events.

	Helen Oyeyemi | Boy, Snow, Bird with Okey Ndibe | Foreign Gods, Inc. Recorded 3/6/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Before her 19th birthday, Helen Oyeyemi had already written the highly acclaimed novel The Icarus Girl, a story about folklore and childhood portrayed “not through the distancing lens of time, but as scary and magical as it really was” (San Francisco Chronicle). Her follow-up, The Opposite House, uses Cuban mythology as means to explore truth, faith, and the thin wall between myth and reality. 2009’s White is for Witching, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award and a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, spins the “unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting” (Publishers Weekly) gothic tale of an old house and a teenaged girl who share equally bizarre and increasingly ravenous appetites. Boy, Snow, Bird revisits the classic story of Snow White through the prism of a young mother’s experiences with race and family in wintry 1950s Massachusetts.  In his “superb” and “gritty” (The New Internationalist) debut novel Arrows of Rain, Okey Ndibe garnered acclaim for his dissection of the relationship between the individual and the larger politics of the modern African state. A journalist and magazine editor in his native Nigeria, Ndibe has taught at several universities, including Trinity College, Brown University, and the University of Lagos as a Fulbright scholar. A founding editor of the esteemed African Commentary magazine, he has contributed articles, poems, stories, and essays to a number of domestic and international publications. Foreign Gods, Inc. tells the tale of an immigrant cab driver’s struggles with American culture, and the choices he makes that lead toward an “inexorable and ineffably sad” (Kirkus Reviews) reckoning.
	Rebecca Goldstein | Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away Recorded 3/4/2014 Listen to MP3 audio “Clever, observant, and nimble,” novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein examines the conflicts between heart and mind, how philosophy and emotion construct the totality of who we are. Her five novels include The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind and The Dark Sister, as well as several short stories, essays, and biographies. Goldstein is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim fellow, and winner of a 1996 MacArthur fellowship which allowed her to write Properties of Light, a “bewitchingly ethereal” (Publishers Weekly) novel about physics and obsessive love. In Plato at the Googleplex, Goldstein places the titular philosopher within a 21st dialogic context.  Delving into the drama of philosophy, she channels Plato in order to explore modern debates about politics, religion, science, and the monumental questions that continue to puzzle us.
	"The Best Day of My Life So Far..." Recorded 11/14/2010 Listen to MP3 audio What happens when Philadelphia seniors open up by sharing stories from their lives? On Seniors' Storytelling Day, be ready to smile, laugh and even cry as our city's seniors take the stage to read stories that they have written, and answer questions from the audience. Inspired by her friendship with her grandma, Benita Cooper launched The Best Day of My Life (So Far), a multimedia storytelling project to connect seniors with younger generations. Find out more about the project and get to know our storytellers before the event via Facebook, Twitter, and their blog. View a short video of a class in action!
	Peter Matthiessen | Shadow Country Recorded 4/17/2008 Listen to MP3 audio A co-founder of the Paris Review and its first fiction editor, Peter Matthiessen received the National Book Award in 1979 for his memoir The Snow Leopard. His novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord was adapted into a film, and Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark, which chronicled the making of the 1971 film Blue Water, White Death, is widely believed to have inspired Jaws. His latest book, Shadow Country, is a reworking of his lavishly praised “Watson” trilogy “one of the grand projects of contemporary literature” (San Francisco Chronicle). Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone were originally conceived as one vast novel that because of its length was broken up into three books. Now, in Shadow Country, Matthiessen has rewritten and distilled a monumental work into a richer, more deeply textured single novel, realizing his original vision.
	Anna Quindlen | Still Life with Bread Crumbs Recorded 2/27/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Explorer of the profound connections of empathy and home, Anna Quindlen eschews the increasingly materialistic and hectic nature of American culture as she “captures both the beauty and the breathtaking fragility of family life” (People). She began her career as a journalist in 1974, and over the next two decades worked most notably at the New York Times, where her column “Public and Private” won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. Since 1995 Quindlen has devoted the majority of her time to writing novels, which include Object Lessons, Rise and Shine, and One True Thing, which was adapted into a popular film starring Meryl Streep. Still Life with Bread Crumbs follows the flight of a photographer from her shaky life in the city to the realizations of peace and personal growth in the country. Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture
	Lorrie Moore | Bark with Chang-rae Lee | On Such a Full Sea Recorded 3/13/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Possessed of “psychological precision” and an “unsentimental knowledge of her characters’ hopes and fears” (New York Times), Lorrie Moore is the author of several short story collections and novels, including Birds of America and A Gate at the Stairs, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English at Vanderbilt University. Bark, Moore’s first story collection in 15 years, explores the exquisite absurdity and heartrending pitfalls of American life.  Author of such widely acclaimed novels as A Gesture Life, The Surrendered, and the “wholly innovative” (Kirkus Reviews) Native Speaker, Chang-rae Lee explores the alienation that modern-day immigrants face from both American culture and the cultures they leave behind.  Lee teaches creative writing at Princeton University. On Such a Full Sea imagines a future dystopian America in which the descendants of immigrants have been subjugated into a strict labor class.
	Tariq Ramadan | Islam and the Arab Awakening Recorded 9/14/2012 Listen to MP3 audio Tariq Ramadan is one of the leading scholars of Islam in the Western world and a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University. Deemed a "Muslim Martin Luther" by Paul Donnelly of the Washington Post, Ramadan was barred from entering the United States by the Bush administration in 2006; in 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted the ban. He is the author of several books, including Radical Reform, In the Footsteps of the Prophet, and What I Believe, an accessible volume on modern Muslim life in the West. His new book, Islam and the Arab Awakening explores the origin of the uprisings in the Arab Spring and the undetermined role that religion will play in the mass movement’s future.
	Ezekiel Emanuel | Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act Will Improve Our Terribly Complex, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System Recorded 3/11/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of nine books on medical ethics and healthcare, Emanuel writes for the New York Times and previously served as a special adviser for health policy in the Obama administration. He is also the author of Brothers Emanuel , a memoir of his brothers—Ari, the real-life model for the bold character of Ari Gold on the hit series Entourage and Rahm, the outspoken mayor of Chicago—and the bond they shared in their paths to success. In his new book, Dr. Emanuel explains the American health care system, its resistance to reform, and the significance of the Affordable Care Act for the future.
	Stephen Jimenez | The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard Recorded 3/11/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Fifteen years ago, Matthew Shepard was found savagely beaten, unconscious, and tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyoming, sparking international attention and the watershed hate crimes bill signed by President Obama in 2009. When investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez traveled to Laramie to conduct research for a screenplay about Shepard, he uncovered instead a tragic story involving another corrosive problem facing the American heartland: methamphetamine. Over the course of a decade-long inquiry, Jimenez found a tangled web of secrets around the murder and an apparent cover-up reaching all the way to the White House. A 2012 Norman Mailer Nonfiction Fellow and recipient of an Emmy and the Writers Guild of America Award, Jimenez has written and produced programs for ABC News 20/20, Dan Rather Reports, Nova, and Court TV.
	Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker | Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love Recorded 3/18/2014 Listen to MP3 audio When prolific drug informant Benny Martinez walked into the offices of Philadelphia Daily News reporters Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker in 2009, he triggered events that would ultimately expose one of the biggest police corruption scandals in Philadelphia history. Spurred by Martinez’s allegations of falsified search warrants and fabricated evidence, Ruderman and Laker uncovered allegations against an elite narcotics squad that included committing sexual assaults, disabling surveillance cameras during drug raids, and robbing small retailers. Laker and Ruderman’s investigation and 10-month Daily News series “Tainted Justice” resulted in an FBI probe, the review of hundreds of criminal cases in Philadelphia, and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. In their new book Busted, Ruderman and Laker recount their daring reportage.

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